LITMIR.BIZ

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in place of a steam-engine as the cheapest form of plant. The Absolute constantly emanating from the atomic motor learnt the whole process of manufacture in a single day, by virtue of its innate intelligence, and flung itself with all its uncontrollable energy or, perhaps, ambition into this occupation. It began to manufacture tacks on its own account. Once it started, nothing could stop it. Without anyone in control of it, the machine vomited forth tacks. The supplies of iron ready to be manufactured into tacks raised themselves of their own accord, one piece after another, thrust themselves through the air, and inserted themselves in the proper machines. It was at first an uncanny thing to see. When these supplies were exhausted iron sprouted out of the earth, the ground round about the factory exuded pure iron as if it were being drawn by suction from the depths of the earth. This iron then raised itself into the air to the height of about one metre and slid jerkily into the machinery as if it were being pushed in. Please note this carefully; I may have said “the iron raised itself” or “the iron slid,” but all eye-witnesses give it as their impression that the iron was lifted by sheer force by an inexorable but invisible power, and with a might so manifest and concentrated that they were seized with horror. It was plain to the eye that it was being done by the exercise of terrific effort.

      Probably some of you have toyed with spiritualism and have seen something of “table-lifting.” If so, you will bear me out in this—that the table certainly did not rise as though it had lost its material weight, but rather moved with a sort of spasmodic effort; it creaked in all its joints, and quivered, and fairly reared, until finally it leaped up in the air as if lifted by a power which was struggling with it for mastery.

      But how am I to describe the frightful, silent struggle which forced iron to raise itself from the depths of the earth, which pressed it into bars, threw these into the machines, and smashed them up into tacks? The bars twisted like withies, fought against the motion that pushed them forward, rattled and grated amid the silence of that which wrestled with them, soundless and substanceless. All contemporary reports speak of the horror of the scene. It was a very miracle, but do not imagine that a miracle is something fabulously easy and effortless; it rather seems that the performance of a genuine miracle entails intense and exhausting exertions. But though the labours of the Absolute might make a great call upon its powers, the most astounding thing about its new activities was the copiousness of its output. Thus, to keep to the department already mentioned, the one solitary tack factory which the Absolute had in its power poured forth night and day so many tacks that they were piled up in mountains in the yard, and eventually broke down the fences and blocked up the street.

      Let us stick to this instance of the tacks for the time being. It shows you the whole nature of the Absolute, just as inexhaustible and extravagant as it was at the time of the Creation. Once it had thrown itself into production, it did not trouble about distribution, consumption, market, or ultimate object; it did not trouble about anything: it simply devoted its gigantic energy to pouring forth tacks. Being itself infinite in essence, it knew neither measure nor limitation in anything, even in the matter of tacks.

      You can well imagine how the workmen in such a factory were startled by the performances of the new motive power. For them it was a case of wholly unexpected and unfair competition, something that made their labour altogether superfluous; and they would quite rightly have protected themselves against this assault of the capitalism of the Manchester School on the working classes by at least demolishing the factory and hanging its proprietors, if the Absolute had not surprised and overpowered them by its first method of attack, religious illumination of every form and degree. Meantime they experienced levitations, prophecies, miracle-working, visions, supernatural cures, sanctification, love for their neighbours, and other conditions equally unnatural, not to say miraculous.

      On the other hand, you can easily guess how the proprietor of such a tack-factory would greet this divine mass-production. He might certainly rejoice, discharge all his workmen, with whom he was in any case well-nigh worried to death, and rub his hands over the volcanic gush of tacks which it cost not a penny to produce. But on the one hand, he himself was sure to fall a victim to the psychic effects of the Absolute, and hand over the whole factory on the spot to his workmen, his brothers in God, as their common property; while on the other hand he very soon realized that those mountains of tacks were utterly valueless because he would find no market for them.

      It is true that the workmen no longer had to stand at the machines and carry bars of iron, and were part-proprietors of the factory besides. But in a few days’ time it became evident that it was necessary to get rid, somehow or other, of the hundred-ton mountains of tacks which had ceased to be saleable goods. At first some attempts were made to send the tacks off in wagon-loads to imaginary addresses; later on, there was nothing for it but to cart them off to huge dumps outside the city. This removal of the tacks kept all the workmen busy for a full fourteen hours a day, but they did not grumble, being illuminated by the divine spirit of love and of mutual service.

      Forgive me for spending so much time over these tacks. The Absolute was ignorant of industrial specialization. It invaded the spinning-mills with equal ardour, and there not only performed the miracle of making sand into ropes, but even spun it into thread. In the weaving and fulling mills and in the stocking factories it laid hold on the entire textile department, and reeled off without pause millions of kilometres of everything that can be cut with scissors. It took possession of the iron works, the rolling mills, the foundries, the factories for agricultural machinery, the sawmills, timber works, rubber works, sugar-mills, chemical works, fertilizer works, nitrogen and naphtha plants, printing works, paper-mills, dye works, glass works, potteries, boot and shoe factories, ribbon works, forges, mines, breweries, distilleries, creameries, flour-mills, mints, motor works, and grinding plants. It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day. Harnessed to agricultural machines in the place of tractors, it ploughed, sowed, harrowed, weeded, cut, harvested and threshed. In every department it augmented the raw material and multiplied the output hundreds of times. It was inexhaustible. It simply squandered its activity. It had found a quantitative expression for its own infinitude: over-production.

      The miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes in the desert was repeated on a colossal scale in the miraculous multiplication of tacks, boards, nitrates, pneumatic tyres, rolls of paper, and manufactured articles of every kind.

      Thus there ruled in the world a state of boundless plenty of all that men could need. But men need everything, everything but boundless plenty.

      XV

      DISASTER

      Of course, in our own orderly and (one might well say) blessed times of general scarcity, we simply cannot imagine the social evil that boundless plenty could be. To us it seems that to find ourselves all of a sudden amid unlimited supplies of everything we wanted would be nothing short of the Earthly Paradise. It would be all to the good, we think; there would be enough of everything for everybody—and Lord! how prices would come down!

      Well, then, the economic catastrophe which befell the whole world at the period we are describing, as a result of the interference of the Absolute in industry, arose from the fact that people could get everything they wanted, not merely at a low price, but simply for nothing. You might help yourself, free of charge, to a handful of tacks, to go into your boot-soles or into the floor; you could just as easily help yourself to a whole cartload of tacks gratis—only I ask you, what would you do with them? Would you haul them a hundred kilometres off and then give them away? You wouldn’t do that; for when you stood before that avalanche of tacks, what you saw was not tacks—relatively useful objects—but something perfectly valueless and senseless in its profusion, something as purposeless as are the stars in the sky. Of course, such a mound of new and shining tacks was often an uplifting sight, and even inspired poetical reflections as do the stars in the sky. They seemed created to be gazed upon in silent wonder. It was a fine sight in its way, as a piece of landscape, just as the sea is from that point of view. But then again, you don’t take the sea away in carts into the interior of the country where there is no sea. There is no economic distribution for sea-water—and now there was none for tacks.

      And

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